JWSCHMAN

Jailhouse Roll Call

· JW
cover

Jailhouse Roll Call on Github: https://github.com/jwschman/jrc

Background

I have a lot of jails running on my TrueNAS server. Checking their status through the GUI or by ssh using iocage list isn't difficult, but I wanted a simple, on-demand page that could give me a quick overview of each jail's status from anywhere on my local network. I'm also in the process of becoming more familiar with programming in Go, so I thought making a page with all my jail information that I could just load up would be a fun and useful project.

Figuring it out

I initially went a difficult and roundabout route which involved sshing directly into the server, running iocage list, grabbing everything from stdout, parsing that, and saving it as a struct to eventually be displayed on a simple webpage. It was good programming practice, but it felt excessive for such a straightforward task, especially since I was pretty sure there was a TrueNAS API that I could use. After a little bit of research I found documentation about the API and how to make the /jails call, and from there things got much more simple.

Outside help

Since I didn't have much experience locally serving static sites, I did some quick research and found a great blog that explained everything I needed to know at https://www.alexedwards.net/blog/topic specifically the page Serving Static Sites with Go and Golang Response Snippets: JSON, XML and more.

Following those guides I was able to very quickly get the page up and running, displaying all the information that I wanted.

Making it look nice with AI assistance

I did want the page to look better than just simple black text on white space, but I have very little experience with css. A friend recently showed me a program he made with the help of GitHub copilot, and he seemed very pleased with the results. Since I don't have a copilot subscription I decided to try ChatGPT to see if could help. I pasted in my index.html template and gave a brief description of what I wanted, and the css it generated was perfect. It even improved upon my original idea by making even and odd rows colored differently. I also decided to push it a little bit and asked for some Javascript so that the columns could be sorted on click. Again, no problem.

Deploying JRC

At the moment I have the program running in yet another jail on my TrueNAS server. I think that makes it jail number 15. Ideally it wouldn't be running on the same server that it's pulling information from, but that's the reality of my current setup. I do have plans though...

Conclusion

This project was a fun way to dive deeper into Go programming and explore some new tools. It also showed me how handy AI can be for quickly handling tasks that I'm unfamiliar with.

References and Tools